WD announced today that it is now shipping WD VelociRaptor hard drives, the next generation of its 10,000 RPM SATA "Raptor" series of drives. Designed with an enterprise-class foundation, the new WD VelociRaptor hard drive is modified specifically for PC and Mac enthusiasts and professional workstations. Destined to become the new high-performance favorite of these groups, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive comes packed with twice the capacity and a 35 percent performance increase over the previous generation.

From the bloodlines of the WD Raptor, the most popular hard drive for high-performance enthusiasts who demand the ultimate SATA drive, the WD VelociRaptor hard drive is built with enterprise-class mechanics and packs 300 GB of storage capacity into a 2.5-inch enterprise form factor. The 2.5-inch WD VelociRaptor drive is enclosed in the IcePack, a 3.5-inch mounting frame with a built-in heat sink -- a customization that fits the drive into a standard 3.5-inch system bay and keeps this powerful drive extra cool when installed in a high-performance desktop chassis.

"Demand for ever-higher PC performance continues to increase and WD is the leader in this category with the WD Raptor. We created WD VelociRaptor hard drives to lead PC enthusiasts into the next era of PC and Mac storage performance and satisfy their insatiable thirst for computing speed," said Tom McDorman, vice president and general manager of WD's enterprise business unit. "The new WD VelociRaptor delivers the greatest performance and reliability of all SATA hard drives currently on the market."

WD VelociRaptor is the next step up for the speed-craving PC enthusiast, and as with all WD drives, attention to detail in features, performance and reliability is a top priority. Features of the new WD VelociRaptor hard drives include:

Rock-solid Reliability - WD VelociRaptor drives are designed and manufactured to business-critical, enterprise-class standards to provide enterprise reliability in high duty cycle environments. The design results in the highest available reliability rating of any SATA drive at 1.4 million hours MTBF.

SecurePark - Parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface, resulting in improved long-term reliability and increased drive protection when the chassis is moved.

Price and Availability
WD VelociRaptor (model WD3000GLFS) hard drives will be available on Alienware's high-performance ALX gaming desktop by the end of April. At launch, Alienware will offer maximum performance with two 300 GB WD VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID 0 configuration on www.alienware.com. WD VelociRaptor hard drives will be shipping exclusively through Alienware this month and will be available through the company's online store and at select distributors and resellers mid-May. Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) for the WD VelociRaptor 300GB is $299.99 USD. More information about WD VelociRaptor hard drives may be found on the company's Web site here.

Does this mean it will be 35% Faster And 35% Louder then it orginally was?

Should be interesting to see a review on this to see how it compares against standard based sata drives. It should also determine whether its worth paying the extra $$ per gb for a slight increase in read and write times.

The price is very nice compared to the other Raptors. I remember when we were paying $10/GB. It is nice that there is actually a little competition to the Raptors now, forcing WD to lower the prices a little bit. Now that there are 7200 RPM drives that are pretty much just as fast for a fraction of the price, WD needs to keep the prices reasonable on the Raptors now.

Are these only SATA 1, because there are faster SATA 2 HDD out there? Seagate has a 15,000RPM SATA2 HDD

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Sata1 & sata2 are just the speed of the interface... this dosent affect the performance of the drive on its own. Theres no disk drive out there that can use the bandwidth of 1.5gbps / 3.0gbps interface on its own...

As far as im aware, the only benefit of using Sata 2 is if you are raiding multiple drives and collectively the drives can utilise that amount of bandwidth... but for a single drive or 2 in raid 0, Sata 1 is fine (1.5gbps)

Sata1 & sata2 are just the speed of the interface... this dosent affect the performance of the drive on its own. Theres no disk drive out there that can use the bandwidth of 1.5gbps / 3.0gbps interface on its own...

As far as im aware, the only benefit of using Sata 2 is if you are raiding multiple drives and collectively the drives can utilise that amount of bandwidth... but for a single drive or 2 in raid 0, Sata 1 is fine (1.5gbps)

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to add more to this, SATA 1 is 150MB/s and sata II is 300MB/s
Even the fastest terabyte drives these days cant keep going at 100MB/s consistently, so even these velociraptors wont break sata-1's specs - SATA-II only really has other features going for it at the moment, not speed.